Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dom Vito Castiglione on July 16, 2014 at 9:48am

Why aren't the people here on the website who have a connection with ebay's fraud department calling in and having these removed? A member here says's he's had many different auction pulled with ease.

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Permalink Reply by Null on July 16, 2014 at 9:56am

Nobody seems to care except a few of us on this website. It's absolutely sickening. 

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Permalink Reply by Dom Vito Castiglione on July 16, 2014 at 10:35am

It makes your blood boil cause not only are these forgers and COA companies working together to scam people, but ebay knows what is happening and does not do anything about it. Ebay is just as guilty but they want to keep making millions every year so they ignore the fraud. Even though Ebay is a huge problem, it's also a combination of these other auction sites along with Coach's Corner. They are all in bed with the many bogus COA companies and Foren.Examiners. They sell their forgeries in bulk on their sites, ebay, flea markets, charity auctions ect. They even had an event at my brother's mall during spring break where different vendors set up tables to sell their items. Some people sold candles, tee-shirts, ect. One vendor sent up about a 15 tables in a row and was selling all sorts of forgeries from sports to entertainment. From Mantle to Jordan to Elvis, everything was bad! I will say though everything was very nicely framed and matted, including his fake jerseys! A woman was buying a Lebron/Jordan dual signed fake 16 x 20. I tried to explain to her that it was a forgery and not only did the scammer get upset with me, but so did the woman! She acted like I wanted her to put it down so when she left, I could buy it. They made up a lie saying their credit card machine was down so it was cash only. People were walking fast to the ATM to get cash out so they didn't miss out on the forgery they wanted. After they paid cash, there was no way to track down the forgers. They were there selling their forgeries like no tomorrow and vanished after the event was finished 5 days later. By the time anyone knew their items were fake, they were long gone! 

Look what happened to Beanie babies. They were a billion dollar a year industry and forgers found a way to make almost identical reproductions. They flooded the market with fakes to the point where nobody had an interest in them anymore and the authentic beanie babies became almost worthless. Same thing is happened with all these expensive woman designer hand bags. If this keeps up much longer, I fear that autograph collecting is doomed.

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Permalink Reply by Null on July 16, 2014 at 11:36am

Yup, it is absolutely unreal how the BUYERS of this stuff get mad when you tell them they are buying fakes! 

People are in denial, they want to believe in fairy tales. 

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Permalink Reply by CJCollector on July 16, 2014 at 3:17pm

In my opinion, Ebay encourages this type of fraudulent activity by doing NOTHING.

Ebay profits big-time from the scammers on Fee-Bay that list and sell forgeries.

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Permalink Reply by Dom Vito Castiglione on July 16, 2014 at 5:50pm

I couldn't agree more with the statement Mr. Williams just made.

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Permalink Reply by CJCollector on July 16, 2014 at 5:51pm

The thing is, there is a ton of money to be made with the sales of forgeries on Ebay, and Ebay knows it.

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Permalink Reply by Dom Vito Castiglione on July 16, 2014 at 6:01pm

Oh, I understand. We're talking tens of millions of dollars of profit for Ebay each year. But don't you'd think ebay would care just a little of having a company that protects their customer from fraud and getting ripped off their money? Doesn't have integrity and pride in doing the right thing mean anything at all? Ebay/Paypal profited easily over 5 Billion in 2013. Even if they took a stand and cut out most of their forgeries (which would be easier than you think), Ebay would obviously still make billions every year!

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Permalink Reply by Randy on July 16, 2014 at 7:34pm

How many good authenticators would Ebay need to try and verify authenticity on a million autographs at any point in time?

There are not enough knowledgeable authenticators to do the job even if Ebay wanted to hire them. How many items to you think one person could verify in a day? Let's say they spent 1/2 minute per autograph and worked 400 minutes/day. Each authenticator would handle 800/day. Let's say based on a 7 day auction window the million autographs could be condensed to 150,000 ending per day so Ebay would need 187 full time authenticators to handle the volume and I think we can agree that 1/2 minute per autograph is not much time as they could not even find exemplars in that amount of time.

It is not realistic.

Let's assume that they would not do anything on any item authenticated by JSA or PSA/DNA even though this forum for the most part thinks they stink as well and that eliminated half of the million autographs. They would still need 93.5 full time authenticators to look at 75,000 autographs/day.

The problem is the buyers!!! If no one bought the forgeries, the bad sellers would have to go away because they would make no money. It cannot be policed by Ebay. It is no different than one policeman with radar on an interstate. He pulls one random speeder over out of 20 speeders because that is all he can do. Nineteen speeders get away with it. Ebay does exactly the same thing. You would probably be surprised how many autographs they take down but as a % of the bad autographs on the site, it is nothing.

Ebay provides a platform for buyers and sellers to conduct business. They do police the site but obviously cannot handle the volume of autographs listed at any point in time. Do you really think that they are going to take down every autograph reported to be bad by Tom, Dick, or Harry? They have no idea if the reporting person knows anything about autographs. They supposedly use some autograph experts to look at some items but again it is like trying to empty an ocean a bucket at a time.

Do they profit from the sales of forgeries? Absolutely! Is there an easy solution as you suggest? Absolutely not!

They could just eliminate all sales of autographs(which will never happen) but I would rather wade through the bad ones to find the good ones and I think most autograph collectors would agree with me.

We have a memorabilia show at our beckon call 24/7/365. I personally would not want that to go away by trying to protect collectors who buy based on price and not knowledge. 

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Permalink Reply by Dom Vito Castiglione on July 16, 2014 at 8:02pm

Believe me, you wouldn't need as many people as you think. Most people who have a great eye for autographs, can tell very easily if they are knowledgeable in certain areas. If ebay hired a fraud team worth anything, the first thing you do is add GA, ACE & GFA to the banned list and automatically eliminates tons of forgeries. You don't need to look at everyone of the millions of different items on the site. Focus on anything that forgers deem desirable. Jordan, Lebron, Mantle, ect. I just got done looking at today's Jordan signatures posted on ebay and in no time I could tell which ones were bad and the few that were ok. Jesus, all ebay would have to do is read this site once in a while and their work would be done for them. 

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Permalink Reply by Randy on July 17, 2014 at 8:32am

I don't care if they have a good eye for autographs, 30 seconds is not much time to evaluate one.

Of course, if they only tried to eliminate bad forgeries of Jordan, Lebron, and Mantle they could do that although there are currently 5,000 autographs for sale on just these 3 players which would take some time. That would leave thousands of athletes and entertainment stars that are extremely valuable to be forged and sold on the site.

By the way, ACE is already banned. However, you can still list items authenticated by them by not mentioning them in the title or description.

I'm amazed that people actually think Ebay is the problem. They are not an auction house who stands behind what is sold. They bring buyers and sellers together in the same way classified ads in newpapers do. The newspaper doesn't stand behind the items listed for sale. It is buyer beware the same as it is on Ebay. 

I personally bought $5,000 worth of bad autographs off Ebay in the late 90's. They all had COAs from some nobody. I thought if it had a COA it was authentic. I found out a few years later the error of my ways. All of my COAs were from the distributors of the Marino family forgery ring.

It was MY stupidity buying something I knew absolutely nothing about, not Ebay's.

You cannot protect the stupid. As Ryan stated, you tell someone they bought a forgery and they want to fight you for saying it. Do they really think they are getting an authentic Mickey Mantle autograph photo for $40? I doubt it! They don't care because they hang it on the wall and no one else who sees it knows it is a forgery and they bought it for peanuts. That is their goal. You cannot stop them.

Just my opinion.

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Permalink Reply by Dom Vito Castiglione on July 17, 2014 at 8:40am

You're wrong. I took a look at all the new Jordan's on ebay yesterday and it only takes me one second on each forgery to tell if they are bad or not. 

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